With Nature: Nature Philosophy as Poetics through Schelling, Heidegger, Benjamin and Nancy

By Warwick Mules

With Nature provides new ways to think about our relationship with nature in today’s technologically mediated culture. Warwick Mules makes original connections with German critical philosophy and French poststructuralism in order to examine the effects of technology on our interactions with the natural world. In so doing, the author proposes a new way of thinking about the eco-self in terms of a careful sharing of the world with both human and non-human beings. With Nature ultimately argues for a poetics of everyday life that affirms the place of the human-nature relation as a creative and productive site for ecological self-renewal and redirection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books Ltd
• Release date: Jan 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781783202928

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First published in the UK in 2014 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2014 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

Chicago, IL 60637, USA

Copyright © 2014 Intellect Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.

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To Helen

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Wanted – A Nature Philosophy

Part I: The Things of Nature

Chapter 1: Nature Otherwise

Chapter 2: Saying Nature

Part II: Nature Philosophy

Chapter 3: Schelling after Kant

Chapter 4: Unground

Chapter 5: Positive Freedom

Chapter 6: Virtual Nature

Part III: Poetics

Chapter 7: Heidegger’s Thing

Chapter 8: Poetics: Benjamin and Celan

Part IV: Technology

Chapter 9: Benjamin: Collapsing Nature

Chapter 10: Nancy: Renaturing and Bio Art

Conclusion: Towards Ecopoetics

References

Notes

Index

Preface

The fundamental threat facing humans today is our inability to live in a non-exploitative relation to the natural world. Our environments are currently unsustainable and nature has become absorbed into a simulated world of technological process. But the threat conceals a profound difficulty: the inability to think about our relation to nature other than in terms of technologically produced ‘nature’ already present to us as something self-evident; something waiting there for us to exploit, enjoy, manage and protect. Nature ‘for us’ is our nature, the nature we possess according to subjective needs, wants and desires. However, the technologies employed to conquer the earth are now so thoroughly entwined in our way of life, we risk becoming enslaved by them. In seeking to find a more sustainable, less exploitative way of living with nature, we risk becoming further entwined in our own techne – our ‘way of being’ through making and producing things – unable to think outside it. One answer is to find a counter-techne that leads us out of our current relation with technologically produced nature such that we can think otherwise. This book is a response to the challenge to think of the human-nature relation ‘otherwise’, to set us on another path, another way of being with nature.

The book undertakes this task by opening up a line of critical thinking beginning with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant’s critique of reason, exposing a gap in reason subsequently addressed by post-Kantian philosophy as a means of grounding thought in the movement of nature itself (poiesis). In particular, I examine the work of the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling whose nature philosophy sets the scene for thinking with nature within the limits of critique. By following Schelling’s insights through to more recent attempts to ground thought in poiesis (Heidegger, Benjamin, Nancy), my aim is to think with nature without surrendering the rigour of critique.

Thinking with nature exposes technology to its own limits and reveals a counter-techne turning otherwise within it. A name for this counter-techne is art. The work of the artwork is to open technology to possibilities unthinkable from the technology itself. Thinking with nature is to think from the stance taken by the artwork both with and against technology so that it is turned otherwise, leading to the uncertain ground of a radical openness. Standing on this uncertain ground allows us to rethink the human-nature relation in the hope of another way of being with nature. By following the turning of art out of technology, we may be able to see another, more just, non-exploitative way of being with nature.

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge a number of people who have helped and encouraged me in my endeavours with this book. In particular I would like to express my gratitude to Helen Miller for her constant support, ideas and suggestions throughout the writing of the book. I would also like to thank Rod Giblett for his encouragement as well as the challenge his own work set for me in developing the argument of this book, and Tony Thwaites for helping me gain a better grasp of how to think the ‘that’ of things. Others who have helped in my journey with this book include David Baker in our conversations about the philosophy of science, Grayson Cooke and Phil Roe for many discussions related to theory and visual arts, Nick Mansfield and Nicole Anderson for our lively discussions on Derrida and Heidegger.

I would also like to thank Colin Shingleton who generously shared his thoughts on Heidegger and Schelling with me. I am also grateful for the support and collegiality of many others, including Emily Potter, Stuart Cooke, Joseph Carew, Gene Flenady, Jane Stadler, Gabriella Blasi, Martin Rice, George Petelin, Elizabeth Stephens, Greg Hainge, John Ryan, Juha Tolonen and Carole Mules.

Sections of Chapter 7 of this book were published in ‘Heidegger, Nature Philosophy and Art as Poietic Event’ in Transformations, no. 21, 2012.

Introduction

Wanted – A Nature Philosophy

I

The title of this book With Nature signifies a hope that critical thinking in the humanities and arts can retain its long-forgotten connection with nature. Today, speaking and writing about nature requires a detour through the subject who speaks, so that nature is pushed to the background as something other, while the speaking itself takes centre stage as the outward sign of a reflection designed to gain knowledge of nature: to gaze upon it, control it and live in it, or even to say that it does not exist. Nature becomes ‘other’ to its rationalization in the saying. This book confronts the limits of this saying, and opens it to other ways in which nature might be said. My aim is to retrace a way of saying the ‘being with’ of nature buried in the writings on nature by the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling and following through to the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and Jean-Luc Nancy. Schelling’s long-neglected nature philosophy (Naturphilosophie) provides a way of thinking that promises to think with nature, not against it. A critique that sets out to think with nature suspends the detour through the subject and draws nature back into the critique. The task of critique is then shifted from defining and defending the subject’s right to speak about nature, towards thinking with nature as a possibility and what it might bring forth and enable.

The book counters a tendency in ecocritical writing to forget nature.¹ For instance, in his book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, Timothy Morton argues that ecocritics should stop using the word ‘nature’: ‘The main theme of the book is […] that the very idea of nature which so many hold dear will have to wither away in an ecological state of human society. Strange as it may sound, the idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art’ (Morton 2007, p. 1). What is Morton’s point? He is saying that by invoking nature as an all-encompassing ‘Thing over There that surrounds and sustains us’ (p. 1), we are inventing an elusive phantom that always ‘gives us the slip’ (p. 2). This elusiveness of nature is something that happens in the literary writings about nature itself, which he then proposes to explore: ‘Ecology without Nature takes nature out of the equation by exploring the ways in which literary writing tries to conjure it up. We discover how nature always slips out of reach in the very act of grasping it’ (p. 19). Nature is not an untouched domain ‘in itself’, but the other of nature writing itself. Morton’s mode of critique is thus negative.² It produces nature as the negation of writing and the thinking subject in whose name such writing takes place. On this score, Morton’s position falls in line with a conventional position in both the humanities and the sciences that, since Kant, limits critique to what it can know about what it critiques, and consequently negates what it critiques in coming to know about it.

In the humanities and science disciplines, nature is understood as the negation of the human. Nature is that which the human is not. As such, human thinking cannot be said to access nature directly, but only indirectly, either through representations or through special kinds of aesthetic experiences or apodictic intuitions. The consequences of this kind of saying of nature have been especially limiting for the arts and humanities, as it places them at a disadvantage with respect to the sciences in articulating accounts of nature. While the sciences develop positive representations of nature through the facility of apodictic truth supported by mathematical certainty, the arts and humanities confine themselves to self-reflections on nature forever running up against their own limits.

For the humanities, nature can only be addressed as a subjective construct or inner experience, and not as an objectively verifiable thing or event. Unlike the sciences, which secure knowledge of nature and natural things through methods of objectification and verification, the humanities employ ad hoc approaches and scholarly interpretations applied in localized sites and texts, producing speculative knowledge about the things of nature with no grip in the world of objective facts. Unlike scientific knowledge that universalizes from the particular, approaches of the arts and humanities tend to stay with the particular, revealing complexity and deep or thick meaning in specific works and practices. The positive side is that the arts and humanities are well capable of producing knowledge enriched by singular encounters with things. However, the negative side is that this enriched knowledge does not easily convert into positive facts in the way scientific knowledge does; it is not highly valued by institutions and bureaucracies who seek the certainty of scientific method, technical fact and economic validity. As a consequence, the humanities and arts tend to play a supplementary role to science and economics in producing facts about nature and the human relation to it. The arts and humanities are reduced to supporting scientific enquiry with knowledge gained indirectly, especially through the critique of nature in terms of subjectively defined aesthetic experience.³

It is not difficult to see that the reluctance of the humanities to engage with nature in any kind of positive way comes from the humanities disciplines themselves. The humanities place limits on themselves to secure critical and speculative knowledge about nature within the rigours of self-reflection. But the price paid is to disable any capacity to engage with nature positively. Nature is negated – pushed to the background or made to disappear behind a mirror of representation that reflects thought back onto itself in the quest to know. Critical enquiry becomes engrossed in analysing the frameworks of representation and the finite modes of subjectivity that produce nature as a meaningful construct or environment for the living subject. Positive knowledge of nature can only be had by way of the negative route of self-reflection; nature is never fully present to the knowing self but always receding or fading away. In its quest to know about nature and natural things, the knowing self constantly runs up against the limits of its own self-reflection. As Timothy Morton has said, nature always ‘gives us the slip’.

Two questions immediately come to mind in response to this self-limitation. First, is it possible to think of nature positively within the western philosophical tradition without first having to go via this negative route? And, second, is it possible to think of this positivity without surrendering the rigours of critique? Is it possible to think of nature neither ‘in itself’ nor ‘for us’ but as a necessity of critique in its very praxis? This book is a response to these two questions. What, then, is a positive philosophy of nature? Instead of thinking of nature as the negation of the human, a positive philosophy begins with the fact that nature and the human are part of the same being. This being is neither nature nor human as they are currently understood, but something common to both yet exceeding them at the same time. In positive philosophy, nature and the human must be thought together as part of the same being, and not as two beings separated by an unbridgeable gap. Although separate beings, they nevertheless share something in common: the fact that they are. This fact is other to both nature and the human, constituting what Schelling calls the ‘third potency’ – the power to begin (Schelling 2000, p. 19).⁴ Otherness is not assigned to nature as separate from human being, but to possibilities opened up in-between the human-nature relation itself, in the contingency of finite existence. I argue in this book that by adopting a positive philosophy of nature, the arts and humanities can encounter and challenge their own self-limitations, opening themselves to possibly new human-nature relations, and seizing back some of the ground ceded to the sciences in a renewed capacity to make positive claims about nature and the human relation to it.

In returning to Morton’s suggestion that ecocriticism should stop using the word ‘nature’, I suggest that placing such a limit on critique simply makes nature come back into the critique in all sorts of unaccounted ways, and indeed, Morton’s own book is a good example of this ‘return of the repressed’; its pages contain numerous instances of the word ‘nature’, as well as lengthy arguments about nature as a construct of human discourse, thus smuggling nature back, in order to banish it yet again in repeated gestures of disavowal. This negative approach to nature, which reduces nature to nothing while elevating its constructedness by and for the human subject to a central place, reaffirms the anthropocentric view of nature – that nature is nothing but a projection of human meaning and value – and remains powerless to change the human relation to nature as such. Instead, my aim is to seek an ecological account of the human-nature relation that places the relation itself en abyme, at the very edge of critique. Here, nature can be encountered in its already negated state as the beginning of another possibility, another way of being with nature.

II

The book begins with the problem of things. Things are possibilities of being. Part I of the book consists of two chapters addressing the ‘things of nature’ from the position of critique. In Chapter 1, I begin by asking: what is an encounter with the things of nature? How does this encounter enable us to be in relation to nature itself? This beginning begins with a refusal. The refusal is to say ‘no’ to thinking of things as objects standing opposed to a subject; to let them be as things. But in saying this, we find that the refusal is itself embedded in this very subject-object relation. The things of nature are already objects of our thought. The book thus begins with a critique of the objectification of the things of nature into knowable objects. My aim is to uncover a set of problems, issues and concepts concerning how we have already come to know nature as an objective domain, and how this knowledge limits our encounter with the things of nature by steering it into specific ways of seeing and experiencing them in systems of applied reason and technical control. My aim is to draw out of this critique a set of positive concepts (postulates), to explore and address the human-nature relation and our place in it. In particular I examine how a critique of nature always begins with ‘things’ so that its thinking carries things with it in what it says and does, opening up possibilities and lines of enquiry.

In the work that it does, critique employs postulates: concepts invoked by the critique as it responds to the questions put to it in its encounter with things. In the chapter I propose the concept of poiesis as one of these necessary postulates. Poiesis refers to emergent transitivity: the activity of shifting and shaping evident in the way the things of nature come forth and show themselves. The chapter examines how poiesis can be used to identify resistivity within system environments. A system can only operate by overcoming the things under its control. For instance, an ecosystem will have already reduced nature to a techne (its means of technical control), so that the things of nature can only appear there in terms of the autopoiesis of the system itself (its mode of self-regulation). However, in their finite singularity, things resist the control of the system, opening it otherwise. The chapter suggests ways in which critique can switch position, to think with things in their poietic line of flight, opening the system otherwise, against its own autopoiesis.

To clarify how this switching of position might take place, the chapter examines ways in which nature has been understood as an organic system in the writings of Karl Marx, showing how his dialectical theory of nature (drawn from Hegel) proposes an anthropocentric projection of human desire onto nature. However, buried in Marx’s writings is a positive concept of the human-nature relation, defined as ‘the self-mediated being of nature and of man’ (Marx 1975, p. 356). This concept of a self-mediated relation between man and nature offers a possibility for ecological thinking to think with the human-nature relation in terms of its own self-mediation. The human-nature relation itself is something positive: a mediation with its own being, its own possibilities, its own ‘life’. This possible life can be understood in terms of the renaturing of ‘denatured’ nature (Nancy 2007, pp. 87–88). For Jean-Luc Nancy, denatured nature does not mean pristine nature stripped of its nature by technology, but nature produced as the ‘event’ of technology itself (p. 87). Technology is precisely this event of ‘denaturing nature’ – of producing nature as already denatured. To live in a world of denatured nature is to live ‘naturally’ as a product of technology. In such a world nature in its ‘naturalness’ is turned into a technical fact. By renaturing I mean the restoration of the human-nature relation to the power of poiesis. To renature nature is to turn the human-nature relation away from its denatured state in technical facts and systems, and to open it to poietic possibility. To follow this line of enquiry I propose the nature philosophy of Schelling. Schelling’s Naturphilosophie moves past anthropocentric dialectics and towards an ecological account of the human-nature relation, where things can be encountered in their singular ‘thatness’, other than as categorical objects of critique (Schelling 2007, p. 147). From this position, we encounter things in their turning otherwise – following their poietic line of flight, carrying the human relation with it.

In Chapter 2 my critique asks: in what way can things be ‘said’? In saying things, we bring them into being, making them meaningful in certain ways. Saying is transitive in its action: it shifts meaning from the saying to that which is said. My concern is to show how the things of nature can be said poietically with the creative shaping of nature, from within systems of meaning and production. We encounter them there as part of nature withdrawing from us. In this withdrawing, they retain a relation with us, a forgotten connectivity reinvigorated in the encounter that leads us out of ourselves, into the in-between of nature as a withdrawing ground and the possibilities it enacts. By staying in this in-between we can ‘say’ nature otherwise; we can carry it elsewhere in a poietic act of saying. To develop this line of enquiry I draw on Ernesto Laclau’s concept of the ‘empty signifier’ (Laclau 1996, p. 37), showing how nature can be understood as an empty signifier, excluded from the system yet returning and interrupting it at the same time. Nature withdraws from the system, yet returns to haunt it with an irreducible otherness. I draw on Nietzsche’s writings on art and nihilism to suggest ways in which the returning of nature can be perceived as a releasing of the human being from enclosure in nihilistic subjectivity. Part I concludes by proposing that critique should become transitively located in what it critiques. To recover a sense of what this might entail, I indicate a return to the seminal moment of modern critique in Kant’s critical philosophy and Schelling’s response to it.

Part II of the book undertakes a reading of Schelling’s nature philosophy as a response to Kant’s critical philosophy. Chapter 3 examines the gap in reason exposed by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1929), and the question of being it raises. The gap in reason is the nothing in-between subject and object, exposing a pre-subjective self to the abyss of absolute freedom. The gap is precisely that which relates subject to object, marking the place of their impossible connection. Kant recoiled from the abyssal gap, warning that it placed a limit on reason and could not constitute a beginning for critical thought, which must always begin from its own auto-reflection. I then examine the response to Kant’s exposure of the gap in reason by Schelling, whose nature philosophy begins not by recoiling into subjective self-affirmation as others had done, but by moving into the gap itself as a place to rethink the human relation with nature. By inhabiting the gap, Schelling restores nature as a positive moment in critique.

Post-Kantian philosophy is dominated by Schelling and Hegel, the two major figures of German Idealism whose work sets the tone for modern philosophical and theoretical critique. Hegel’s response to Kant’s exposure of the gap in reason is in many respects similar to Schelling’s, but differs in one crucial aspect. While Hegel develops a dialectical critique that continues to negate nature as other, Schelling begins with the otherness of nature and turns this into a positive moment in the critique itself. For Hegel, thought moves dialectically to overcome nature, whereas for Schelling, nature always retains itself as an ‘indivisible remainder’ (Schelling 2006, p. 29) in thought’s dialectical relation with it. Hegel criticized Schelling’s concept of the indivisible remainder as the ‘night in which […] all cows are black’ (Hegel 1977, p. 9), a vacuous non-place without any enabling capacity. For Schelling, the indivisible remainder is a positive moment in the negativity of thought: a place that enables beginnings.

Schelling and Hegel take critique on diverging paths. Hegel takes the path of negative critique where, in Timothy Morton’s terms, nature is always giving us the slip, while Schelling takes the path of positive critique where nature is always beginning, always possible. Hegelian critique occludes nature in thought’s self-becoming, while Schellingian critique opens itself to nature as an indifference in thought itself – as thought’s possibility. We can delineate two strands of critique out of these diverging paths: one strand continues to see nature as the other to human thought and action, while the other strand begins in nature’s ‘event’, as the absolute possibility of human thought and action. A nature philosophy must decide which path it wants to take: the negative path that sees nature as other, thereby consolidating thought in its own self-limiting, or the positive path that sees itself as already with nature in its otherness, as an open possibility. One secures knowledge of nature in thought’s categories and the consistencies of the system, while the other opens these categories and systems to the possibility that things can always be otherwise. In what follows in this book I take the latter, Schellingian path.

In Chapters 4–6, I explore Schelling’s philosophy as positive critique, and draw from it a number of key concepts, including the unground, partage, positive freedom and virtual nature, to be employed throughout the book. My aim in these chapters is to uncover a conceptual terrain in Schelling’s philosophy that I call ‘factical ontology’, or critique addressing the fact of things as irreducibly and contingently there, and encountered as such. Facticity is present throughout Schelling’s philosophy as a subtended necessity ‘that nature be’, and, as such, philosophizing about nature must begin from this fact. By uncovering this factical-ontological terrain in Schelling’s philosophy I counter two tendencies in Schellingian scholarship – to see his philosophy as either failed Hegelianism, or as a materialist alternative to Hegel’s idealist philosophy. Instead, I propose that Schelling’s philosophy is specifically placed to set us on the path of positive critique.

Chapter 4 engages with Schelling’s philosophy of freedom, in particular his key idea of the ‘indivisible remainder’ found in Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom (Schelling 2006) as the absolute indifference separating things in a common being. The indivisible remainder becomes the unground: the contraction of being into ‘nothing’, enabling things to relate to one another while withdrawing from them. Schelling’s argument sets up a positive mode of critique that thinks with things in terms of the remainder, opening them to free possibility. Schelling’s nature philosophy can be read in terms of the things of nature as singularly resistive to objectification in the causal-mechanistic determinations of the system of nature, as established by Newton and confirmed in Kant’s critiques. In this resistive mode, things are eternally free in the sense that they partake of the free being of nature as the indifferent withdrawing ground opening otherwise.

Chapter 5 continues this pursuit of the indivisible remainder in terms of the fact of freedom – the fact that humans exist freely in relation to the withdrawing ground. In its positive mode, nature is neither good nor evil but indifferent to both – a free living ground opened to possibility and otherness. Schelling’s task is to recover this living ground as it withdraws from us. The freedom Schelling recovers is not the negative freedom that negates nature in affirming itself, but the positive freedom of being with nature opened to possibility in the eternal beginning of the decisive act of freedom, yet blocked from taking place by the determinations of the system. Positive critique releases the blocked living ground by thinking with nature, not against it. The paradigm case for this kind of freedom is the artist’s stroke; in making a stroke the artist resists the techne that determines how an artwork should look through generic conventions, while entering further into the deed of art as a matter of being free with the artwork itself. The gesture of freedom is exemplified by the artist’s stroke.

Chapter 6 recovers a sense of virtual nature from Schelling’s middle-period writings, especially in The Ages of the World (2000). In Schelling’s terms, virtual nature is the nature to come: an age of providence beginning to emerge in the current age. Schelling historicizes his dialectical philosophy of nature as the evolution of reason seeking to free itself from the determinations of the current age, in rotations of the ‘wheel of nature’ (Schelling 2000, p. 46) as time realizing itself in phases of tensed being (the past, the present, the future). The future age (providence) is already pre-figuring itself in the present age, but is blocked from coming forth by the present age keeping itself present to itself and determining itself to be. The chapter examines this dialectical movement of possible historical ages coming forth in turn by considering Schelling’s philosophy of art.

In The Philosophy of Art (Schelling 1989), Schelling argues that art is founded in myth. Myth reconciles the finite with the infinite thereby providing the world with meaning. For Schelling, myth begins in the Greek beginning (the age of Homer) where human thought and action were immediately connected with nature. The world suffers a fall with the advent of reason, triggering a dialectical movement within reason itself into distinct ages. These ages are analysed by Schelling in terms of interactions between symbol, schemata and allegory. Art works through the symbol to reconcile the other two modes, thereby restoring human being to mythic unity with nature. For Schelling, the aim of critique is to unblock the ‘inhibition of the formation’ (Schelling 2004, p. 6) of the current age to allow a ‘new mythology […] to arise’ (Schelling 1978, pp. 232–33). However, Schelling’s analysis runs up against its own limits. The current age will never get beyond its own allegorizing of the mythic beginning. Any new beginning will always repeat the old myths in a new guise, closing the new age in a regression to myth. To counter this return to myth, we need to ‘demythify’ the existing myths blocking the beginning from coming to pass. In its allegorical mode, art demythifies the mythic union of the human and nature, carrying the human-nature relation with it in open possibility. By demythifying myth we keep the current age in perpetual ‘beginningness’, always open and connected in free possibility. Art can point us in this direction.

In the third part of the book (Chapters 7–8) I reopen the question of being put to critique by the exposure of Kant’s gap, in terms of the event of nature. In Schelling’s nature philosophy, the things of nature are not dealt with sufficiently as things, but as momentary possibilities that disappear into the activity of eternal becoming. To counter this insufficiency, the book begins again with things. This second beginning begins with Heidegger’s questioning of the being of things in his seminal work Being and Time (Heidegger 1962), and returns critique to the things themselves as already disposed in the world.⁵ For Heidegger the modern world has formed in such a way that the things of nature are already given over to the ordering and controlling that makes this world what it is. Thought already finds itself thrown into this world of predisposed things as products of techne: equipment ready-to-hand for human use (Heidegger 1962, p. 98).⁶ The challenge to think positively with the things of nature therefore requires a resistance to the techne already turning them into objects or items of ‘standing reserve’ (Heidegger 1977, p. 17).

In Chapter 7 I examine Heidegger’s later writings on art and technology in terms of the things of nature as things that ‘thing’, or gather other things to them in an event of Being.⁷ In the modern world, things are already given over to technology, so that a thing can only ‘thing’ from within its already technologically enframed position. Thus, the opening of the event of Being requires a turn out of technology. Heidegger identifies this capacity to turn out of technology with art, and more specifically with the work that the artwork does. Art enables a beginning by turning out of technology, a beginning-in-resistance that opens into absolute indifference, preparing the way for a world to come. The artwork’s turning is thus an event of Being (Ereignis): a special moment of openness (the Open) that must be kept open if the event of Being is to be encountered. Heidegger’s insight is that the openness of Being must be kept open and not closed in some historical or natural way of being. Heidegger’s later writings on technology and nature have been used in ecocriticism – the critical-cultural study of the human-nature relation – to argue for a return to pre-technological nature (e.g. Foltz 1995).⁸ I will show how this reading of Heidegger overlooks crucial issues of the turning out of technology, a turning that does not leave technology behind, but stays within it ‘otherwise’ in an absolutely open sense. Turning awaits the event of Being, it does not move into it.

In Chapter 8, my aim is to develop a poetics that avoids the trap of mythifying nature. In this chapter I employ the concept of ‘poetizing’ used by both Heidegger and Benjamin in their readings of Hölderlin’s poetry. Why poetics and not aesthetics? Aesthetics reduces nature to subjective states, feelings or affects, thereby keeping nature at bay while it attends to the subject’s responses to it. By way of contrast, poetics concerns itself with the ‘saying’ of nature as a stance in the world that carries nature with it. Poetics reads the poem or the work of art in terms of the stand it takes with respect to what it says about the world it calls into being. Poetizing is this carrying of nature as part of the artwork as well as the reading of it. Heidegger’s poetizing makes Hölderlin’s poetry stand with respect to a world already mythified in a special moment of predestined being (Being), thus undermining his insight that the openness of Being be kept open and not re-enclosed in myth. I show how Benjamin poetizes the same poetic work (although not the same poem) in the opposite way: as a demythification of Being. The poem does not stand steadfast awaiting the event of Being, but is unravelled by it in a disseminating movement of poietic openness. Benjamin’s poetizing of Hölderlin’s poems demythifies their mythic foundations, sending them into an openness called forth by the poems themselves.

A similar demythification of myth can be found in Celan’s poetry, in particular his poem ‘Todtnauberg’, written on the occasion of his visit to Heidegger in his mountain hut in 1967. In the chapter, I read this poem in terms of the stand it takes with respect to the voice that speaks through it, a voice that comes from an absolute nowhere. This voice bears witness not only to the meeting between the poet and the philosopher, but also to the death event of the Holocaust, and hence to the death of Meaning as such. The voice is empty: it is not Celan speaking as subject of his own thoughts, but the voice of the other opened in possibility. The poem thus calls forth others to inhabit this empty space, to bear witness to the bearing witness, thereby keeping the space open for repeated witnessing. In its own enactment, in its poetic stance, the poem opens itself to future readings always to come. My aim in these readings is to counter the argument made by Alain Badiou that the age of the poets is over (Badiou 1999, p. 71); poetry and art can no longer carry the meaning of the world, a responsibility now carried by science and logical calculation. My counter argument is that poetizing cannot afford not to continue; it must continue to keep the Open open, thereby fending off the closure of Being in the matheme and its tendency towards system and controlling techne.

In the fourth part of the book (Chapters 9–10) I extend the poetics established in Chapter 8 into the question of technology and the human-nature relation embedded in it. Chapter 9 examines Benjamin’s concept of mythic connectedness as an aura produced in technological mediation. My aim is to counter Jonathan Bate’s proposal for an ecopoetics based on a pre-technological, pre-political re-mythologizing of the human relation to nature. For Bate, industrialized things cannot ‘thing’ because they lack poietic openness. I challenge this view, and propose that industrialized things are capable of thinging when experienced as auratically charged fallen objects – things having fallen from objectification into obsolescence, yet flashing with residual mythic connectedness in the ‘in-between’ of new and old technologies.

Benjamin’s essays on technologically produced things such as photographs, films and mechanical devices, can be read in terms of his broad concern to ‘form a pure and systematic continuum of experience’ (Benjamin 1996, p. 105) – a connectedness between things irreducible to objectification in categorical thought. My aim is to open the human-nature relation by drawing from Benjamin’s analyses of finite experience and encounters with things in industrialized technology. Unlike Heidegger’s analysis of technology that stands in readiness for the event of Being, Benjamin’s analysis is already part of the event of Being in dissipating technologically produced things. We do not await the nature to come; we are already part of its unstable, chaotic dispersal. I propose an ecopoetical stance situated on the unstable ground of experience in-between fading and emerging technologies, where another nature is beginning to form. This other nature is neither nature ‘in itself’ nor nature ‘for us’, but the poietic openness of a nature not yet formed and always unknown. Following Benjamin, the politics of ecopoetics shifts from seeking out experiences with things in pre-technological myth, to the critical-analytical task of demythifying the already mythified objects of industrialized technology, to allow them to ‘thing’ in residual mythic connectivity. The politics of ecopoetics concerns a poietic release of things from the totalizing tendencies of technology and a defence of their connectedness to other things. For Benjamin, connectedness through poetizing is the ‘supreme sovereignty of relationship’ (Benjamin 1996, p. 34) that must be defended at all costs. By defending the relation of things to themselves we also defend our own free being with nature, insofar as things are already opened to us poietically. I argue that an ecopoetics needs to defend the commonality of the relation